You are looking down the barrel of a peck of trouble.

I see that only one third of the class has actually done any work on the chapter 2 mini-quiz as of this afternoon. This week we are already on chapter 4.

When the midterm comes up on Feb. 10, you are going to be hurting.

You had better get down to business.

New podcasts for chapter 4; learning module.

The exercises in chapter 4 have a few new visual podcasts in iTunes U.

Also, the new learning module is now up. It includes a reading assignment to get you ready for Writing Assignment 1.

New learning module, with some extra prep work for writing assignments

The Week 3 learning module is now UP. It contains the prime study tool, the Chapter 4 concept guide, plus a mini-quiz for secondary work. Finally, it has Writing Assignment 0, which outlines some reading you can do to prepare for the other writing assignments.

Writing Assignment 0 is a study assignment, not for points on your semester grade -- although all the points you eventually earn in Writing Assignments 1, 2 and 3 depend on what you do here.

TAs for this semester

I wan to introduce our two teaching assistants for the semester:

1. Summer Star Jimenez. She goes by her middle name, Star.
2. Zach Anderson.

Zach and Star will be contributing to discussions, checking our various mini-quizzes and helping me with grades. So when you see their name in Discussions or elsewhere, assume they are very wise.

Welcome aboard, Star and Zach!

Internet Exploder and iTunes U

I just finished helping a student get to our iTunes U podcast area. It was a Windows 7 laptop, runnng Internet Exploder. We got the iTunes U link to navigate correctly from Webcourses by clicking the security dialog boxes that Internet Exploder and Windows 7 throws at you.

Do not just willy nilly buzz through those security dialogue boxes. Bill Gates has it set up so that Windows 7 and Internet Exploder consider links to iTunes as "hostile." Yeah, maybe hostile to his bank account.

You can consider iTunes U to be safe, though.

Some podcasts are now UP in our iTunes U area.

I just uploaded some mini-podcasts concerning concepts in Ch. 2 and Ch. 3:

1. Roofer's nail: concerning Ex. 20 on p. 31.
   
2. baseball PSM Ch. 2, 24: concerning a nice exercise in the problem solving manual (PSM).
   
3. Trajectories and instanteneous velocities: an eleboration on the concept of vector in Ch. 2.
   
4. Granny car, Ex. 16, p. 31: concerning the accelerations.
   
5. Exercise 4, Ch. 3: concerning how to balance forces, a critical concept for this semester.

I will be placing more podcasts in iTunes U as we go through the semester.

There is a link on the Webcourses homepage that launches iTunes and moves you to our iTunes U area. When you are there, your iTunes will look like this:

Remember: these are visual podcasts. You must subscribe and download the artwork in order to see the visual content, and the visual content is EVERYTHING: diagrams, equations, calculations etc.

Note: you should also be able to launch iTunes from the "Online Course Tools" tab in your my.ucf.edu portal page.

Get your library card ready for off-campus access NOW.

We will be reading scientific articles in online journals for spring semester, using the UCF library's proxy server. It works nicely but ONLY IF your library card is activated.

That being the case, it behooves you to get it activated. You can do so online, through the online journal access page. Follow the directions there for activation. Do it soon, because it takes some time for the library workers to get it done, and we will need to read articles during the first week of classes.

You can try out your library card by logging on to read this article about Saturn from Nature. Some sweet images of unusual rings!

Welcome aboard

Students for Spring 2010, welcome aboard.

Every week there will be a "learning module" in Webcourses. There is a very basic learning module ready now, for Week 1, and it includes a small To-Do List.